Washington City Paper has published a lengthy article about Diane Ravitch. Deep in the piece is a sentence noting that Ravitch’s longtime partner was once a New York City public-school principal whose program was “shut down” by Joel Klein in 2005 (I’m told the program was not “shut down,” actually,...
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It’s refreshing to hear that NPR is alert to the “education crisis” rhetoric peddled seemingly nonstop. I wrote about this disaster-language just recently, in relation to civics education, but I could’ve written about it in relation to just about anything—put bluntly, crisis rhetoric has become the de facto response to...
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The New York Times has a long piece about how, because the Department of Education has now required colleges to wring more racial information from their applicants, and because those colleges’ application forms now include many more race-description options, it’s become difficult for admissions committees to make their affirmative-action decisions. Is...
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In his recent post, “Preempting the Naysayers,” Chris points out that the ELA standards of two states and one kind-of-state—California, Indiana, and Washington, D.C.—received from Fordham Institute standards reviewers higher marks than did the new Common Core ELA standards. But, he notes, the ELA standards of 32 states received worse...
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I had a conversation today with a friend, a mother of two young boys, who recently won for them, through a lottery, places in a Washington, D.C., charter school. My friend mentioned that she has been approached by several people looking to buy the spots she won; these people are...
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This analysis by Kevin Carey is flawed. He criticizes Diane Ravitch's recent New York Times op-ed, in which he sees a contradiction between the author's censure of the 100-percent proficiency crowd, those who "believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement,” and her reproof of President Obama for publicly praising...
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Jonathan Franzen gave a commencement address at Kenyon College a few days ago and the New York Times published part of it in the newspaper. Many of us operate in a constant whirl of cheap information and to read Franzen’s words is to be smacked in the face, reminded of...
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Diane Ravitch’s latest piece in the New York Times contains some fine, necessary instruction to which many in the education-policy world might listen: stop creating education miracles. One can be wary of Ravitch’s late-period work, suspicious of her use of data and facts, and still believe her correct when she...
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Louis Menand offers opposing views of college in the latest New Yorker. On the one hand, he writes, college is basically “a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they...
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William Damon, professor of education at Stanford and a Hoover Institution fellow, has written a book, Failing Liberty 101, about young Americans’ ignorance or eschewal of civic virtue and the extreme danger for the United States such disregard engenders. The threat of an uneducated citizenry, writes Damon, is “a threat...
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